What You Didn’t Know About Follower Wonk

So, you’ve heard about Followerwonk, but want to know more – just how important is it to utilise Twitter within your marketing strategy? In this guest post Ed Hallinan, web-editor for digital consultancy InterGreater, will be explaining why Followerwonk is so important, paying particular attention to its search features, as well as lesser-known tips & hints.

When Would Follwerwonk be Useful?

There’s no doubt about it, the more variety you have within your marketing strategy, the greater the impact it will have on search ranking. Concentrating on effective keywords and link-building will provide sturdy foundations, but only when you add social media to the mix will you see results amounting to more than the sum of their parts.

With over 500 million users, Twitter provides an incredible platform for outreach. However, the problem comes with time-management: one can waste hours tweeting aimlessly to an already overloaded audience. Instead, wouldn’t it be be great to target the most relevant and influential people within your industry, reaching the select few ‘tweeters’ with real clout?

Luckily, followerwonk allows you to do just that – the essential tool for Twitter outreach. At InterGreater, it is one of the key tools we use to educate our clients on the world of Social Media.

The Basics of Followerwonk

1. Create a Twitter Account: It goes with out saying, that to get the most out of Followerwonk, you’ll need a Twitter account. This sounds obvious, but sometimes people are too precious about the research they do before getting an account. The beauty of Twitter is its simplicity – you can easily change your information as and when you need to. The best bet is to get cracking asap!

2. Link Up with SEOmoz: While not essential, linking up to an SEOmoz account will automatically load in all the information from your account for you. Not only does this make it far easier to compare your account to others, but also speeds up the research process.

3. Start with a Search: Familiarise yourself with the followerwonk tool by conducting a simple search. Just hit ‘search Twitter bios’ – the first tab at the top of the page. You can treat this in a similar way you might do keyword research. Simply type in a keyword which will be relevant to you. InterGreater has done a lot of content writing for online pawnbroker borro, who specialise in loans against assets such as watches. So here I might search the term ‘luxury watches’, with the following results:

Now you’ll notice this is a search of biographies, not usernames. It follows that if someone mentions a keyword in their biography (something which has a limited number of characters) that it must have a direct relevance to their business. Here we have found 492 biographies – but are they all relevant? At this stage we would advise downloading the results as a CSV file for further analysis.

Searching In Greater Depth

Making use of your results; Ok, so you’ve found some biographies with the relevant keywords – but how does that help you? Well, in two ways:

1. Research: it stands to reason that these Twitter users will be posting relevant content, in this case on the topic of luxury watches. At InterGreater this is incredibly useful for providing fresh content for new ideas, such as a weekly blog we write for borro.

2. ReTweets: by clicking the ‘more options’ button below the search bar, you can refine your results. Accounts are more likely to be either ‘spammy’, or have limited reach when there are more following than followers, so this advanced search tool allows you to find those accounts with low numbers of following, but high numbers of followers.

TOP TIP: Create a List
Many bloggers out there will need to write articles encompassing a number of different categories. We’ve already mentioned our online pawnbroker who are just one of the clients we generate content for. It’s not just watches we write about, with other assets including cars and fine wines. However, seeing tweets about all these different categories can be very confusing. Also, it might be off-putting for future clients to see that your business is following fine wines if you are supposed to be offering SEO advice!

To combat these issues, we would recommend creating a list. Once you have narrowed your followerwonk biography search down to the most influential & relevant tweeters, you can add them to a list on your twitter account. You can then single out the tweets solely from this list and even better, can tweet directly to the list members when you have suitable content to share.

Lists are a great way to generate exposure as you can choose to make your list public, not only notifying the members of that list, but allowing anyone to subscribe to it. Alternatively, you can make a list private and – here’s the best bit – you can easily add twitter addresses to it without following them! Perfect, if you don’t necessarily want to be associated with the list members for whatever reason.

Try it For Yourself

The biography search button is just one of the many incredibly useful search tools which Followerwonk provides. Once you’ve got the gist of it, why not try comparing your profile with a rival to see who is following them, as well as how often they are tweeting? As social media continues to grow, Google algorithms are giving more and more weight to ‘social authority’ so never has it been more important to get the most out of Twitter.

We hope this blog has given you a good insight into Followerwonk – now why not try it for yourself?